Scratch Bakery’s Phoebe Lawless gets back to her roots with a second bakery

Starting Wednesday, there will be twice as much Scratch baking to love.

The second location of award-winning Phoebe Lawless’ bakery will open next door to her first full-scale restaurant The Lakewood. When she took over the 7,000-square-foot Davis Baking Co. building to open her restaurant, opening a second Scratch location became too good of an opportunity to pass up.

“The space allows for it; we have this wholesale production bakery in the back and it seemed silly not to have a retail front,” Lawless said. “It’s a perfect little space.”

Lawless said her downtown Durham bakery, which opened in 2010, has become more of a cafe, doing most of its business in coffee, breakfast and lunch. The new Lakewood bakery will get back to the breads and pies on which Scratch was founded.

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Chef Phoebe Lawless, owner of Durham’s Scratch Bakery, opened The Lakewood in Durham in May in a building that was home to the Davis Baking Company for more than 60 years. She will open her second Scratch Bakery location next door in October 2017.

Juli Leonard jleonard@newsobserver.com

“This will return a little more to our roots,” Lawless said. “We’ll have a lot more bread. We’ve built a bread program we’re pretty proud of.”

The second Scratch, affectionately dubbed “Baby Scratch” by Lawless on social media, will open with an espresso and coffee menu and will soon add weekday breakfast. It will be open 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. and close only Tuesday.

Lawless has been nominated for a James Beard Award several times. She was a semifinalist for Outstanding Pastry Chef in 2013 and 2014. In 2015, 2016 and 2017, she was a semifinalist for Outstanding Baker.

The Lakewood opened in May.

Info: The new Scratch Bakery will be at 2022 Chapel Hill Road, Durham. The original location is at 111 Orange St., Durham. piefantasy.com.